I’ve been using embiggen on android for years but a foss alternative would be nice.

Didn’t they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess. Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that’s a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.

The way I see it is since I’m not a reddit customer, then I’m the product.
Except, if I’m the product, you’re probably not supposed to nickle and dime me.
It’s kinda like if McDonald’s was trying to charge cows for the privilege of being ground into patties, but relied on them to go through the process of their own free will.
Without user content, reddit is just an empty husk, a waste of data center resources, yet they behave like they’re somehow entitled to my engagement on the platform.

As for how they’ve handled things, it’s been a train wreck.
Just requiring reddit premium to have access to the API/3rd party apps would have made a few waves, but nothing like this. Keeping their mouth shut would have been more useful than almost everything they’ve done… whatever their strategy was…

Even without any of that though, they’ve been working hard at making the experience worse for a while. The redesign focuses on the user consuming ads instead of content, dooms scrolling instead of reading or commenting.

TL;DR: They were going to shit regardless, they just decided to use more fans.